http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/jazz-trumpeter-freddie-hubbard-dies-1003925464.story
This is sad news. I was supposed to see Freddie a few months ago in Dallas, but he cancelled due to health reasons. Freddie along with Lee Morgan really embraced the concept of strength in trumpet playing. Trumpet has the potential to be very loud and in your face. I’m sad that I never got to see him perform before he died.
Ethan Iverson has already put up a collection of important albums and links up at his blog, Do The Math. I saw the Bad Plus last night. Siri, my sister and I were fortuitously moved from the mezzanine to a table on the floor for some unknown reason. They played a couple tunes that they played last year, such as Ornette Coleman’s “Song X.” Being on the floor was great. Though we were off to the left side a bit, it was good to be able to see Iverson’s hands, which were matter and antimatter, operating in simultaneous and seemingly disparate meters and tempos.
I’ve only been back in Minnesota for a few days, and it has already been a most musical experience. I sat in on a rehearsal with the Nova Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. I’ll be seeing them at O’Gara’s in St. Paul tonight (Tuesday) and quite possibly sitting in a few tunes. They’ll be playing quite a few Dan Cavanagh tunes. I rehearsed a couple of them with the band and thought they were pretty cool!
I also brought in three of my own charts. They were read to positive responses, which made me happy. The group has 4 trumpets and 4 trombones as well as no guitar player. I may revise my charts someday to better suit that instrumentation instead of the 19-piece Kenton style monstrosities we have at UNT. I moved some guitar solos to other instruments and had the bones play parts 1, 2, 3 and 5.
After that rehearsal, I went back to St. Paul to see Happy Apple play at the Artist’s Quarter. Both sets were great and the Dave King banter was in top form. Comical highlights include King calling the soprano sax “the money stick” and the band playing about 15 seconds of “The Cult of Personality” by Living Colour (which would be a bitchin’ tune to play in any circumstance). I also ran into some musician friends who I hadn’t seen for years. This jazz is a small world.
After the Christmas festivities at home, I’ll be seeing the Bad Plus at 9:30 next Sunday. I always forget to buy tickets early, so the seats are mezzanine level and quasi centered. Next year I’ll hop on the tickets early and get a table down by the stage. The Bad Plus brought it last Christmas and they’ll bring it this one too for sure.
My personal experience in listening to jazz has been particularly scatterbrained. I owned very few actual jazz albums before going to college. It sort of makes me wonder how I decided to major in something I knew so little about in comparison with my peers.
Once I got to UNT, I was suddenly surrounded with people who had been listening to this music all their lives, with influences and suggestions from well-listened teachers. There were kids my age who had truly intricate knowledge of many important jazz albums. A lot of the most famous players in jazz were little more than names to me. Some particularly poor scores on Jay Saunders’s Intro to Jazz Records tests made it abundantly clear that I needed to do a HELL OF A LOT MORE LISTENING to jazz if I really wanted to understand and play it well. Since then, my knowledge and understanding has grown a lot, but still, as I said earlier, scatterbrained. In the same way that a puzzle is not completed from the top left to the bottom right, the gaps in my knowledge get filled in a seeminly random fashion. I’ve written about this before.
Today, Ethan Iverson, the pianist for The Bad Plus dropped a motherlode of blog posts on various topics in jazz. My understanding of these topics ranges from paltry to moderate. It’s obvious from his writing that the dude has listened to more than a few metric assloads of jazz in his time. I’ve given a couple of these articles a skimming and will continue to dive into them and listen to the albums and players he’s referenced. I’ll do this especially in the Marsalis/Young Lions-centered pieces. I probably have fewer jazz records from the 1980s than any other decade.
Iverson is only 11 years older than me, but he has been in New York for about 15 years, which means he’s experienced a lot of the major changes in the scene firsthand. To me and people my age, it’s all history. It’s very distant. If I want to know about Wynton Marsalis’s influence in New York, I have to read or hear about it. I didn’t live it. It’s the same thing with when even relatively newer groups/artists like the Bad Plus, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Joshua Redman. By the time I was aware of these people, they had already made their splashes and had grown from their initial albums.
This sort of sounds like complaining, I guess, but I’m OK with my situation. I’ll bet a lot of people my age have a similar experience. I’ll continue filling in gaps, however haphazardly. The way I write and play music is constantly being influenced by things I hear from all different periods. Quincy Jones’s old Basie charts show me things I want to learn and incorporate as much as Maria Schneider’s, Darcy James Argue’s and VOID’s (Tom O’Halloran and Troy Roberts).
I’m planning on seeing Iverson wih the rest of the Bad Plus at the Dakota around Christmas time. They always have a run of shows there this time of year. I went last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ll also be able to catch Happy Apple during my time back home. It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen them. They have seemed to always have a show the weekend before I get back to Minnesota for a break from school.
I sure have lots of thoughts in my head.
Every so often, I come across a song that I can listen to over and over again. The smart playlists on my iTunes tell me the most played songs on in my library. Here are the 10 most played songs right now:
1. Halloween, Alaska - Drowned
2. Jackson Browne - These Days
3. Wilco - Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway(again)
4. Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry On Their Own
5. Halloween, Alaska - The Four Corners
6. The Hold Steady - Citrus
7. Ozma - Immigration Song
8. Guster - Come Downstairs and Say Hello
9. Halloween, Alaska - Call It Clear
10. Wilco - Jesus, etc.
Halloween, Alaska is one of my newfound favorite bands. They are a Minnesota group and they very much remind me of the Postal Service, but with less formulaic melodies and structures. Dave King of The Bad Plus drums for Halloween, Alaska.